‘You are reserved for a great Monday!’ Fine, but Sunday will never end.—Kafka

October 24, 2005

Did Somebody Say Pop Culture?

As is well-known, Zizek delights in obscenities, in references to toilets, pubic hair, sexual acts, in dirty jokes and examples from popular culture. Nearly every commentator on his work emphasizes his combinations of high and low culture, of philosophical engagements with the German Enlightenment combined with observations on cartoons, Coke, the Gap, and Kinder-Eier. For some readers, this engagement with popular culture marks Zizek as necessarily unserious or not worth taking seriously.

Other readers of his work criticize less this engagement with popular culture than Zizek's own self-popularization. He seems not to take himself seriously, so why should we? So, he has all sorts of popular pieces in the London Review of Books and In These Times, not to mention a feature length documentary film all about him. The moves in the popular writing seem both too simple and too hard; too hard if to defend them requires references to twenty other books; too easy in their quick reductions and simple equations. Shouldn't serious philosophers do better? If they can't make the argument in a short space, then wouldn't seriousness require them not to make it at all?

How might one think about these two themes of unserious and popular culture, of having popular content and being popular content? The key, it seems to me, is objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, or ambiguous kernel of excess jouissance. I want to explore this by looking at a couple of passages from For They Know Not What They Do.

Zizek says that, at the 'center of the theoretical space' of this book is 'of course the author's (and, as the author hopes, also the reader's, enjoyment of popular culture.' So, his enjoyment, and possibly ours, is at the center of his thinking (in this book). It's the excess around which his thinking circles and which permeats it. It makes sense, then, to think of popular culture as objet petit a.

Zizek also says that 'the analyst refuse to offer the analysand any support in the shape of ideals, goals, and so on.' One should keep in mind that the discourse of the analyst begins with objet petit a, that remainder is the place the discourse starts. This suggests that Zizek is in the position of the analyst. He begins with excess enjoyment and refuses, deliberately, to offer his readers ideals and goals.

If this is plausible, then Zizek's making of himself into popular culture seems a necessary component of his emphasis on popular culture and enjoyment. He is making himself into the object of enjoyment, an excess that cannot be necessarily or easily recuperated/assimilated. And this excess, moreover, is unavoidable, an unavoidable component of any philosophical effort (though many try to deny it). So Zizek emphasizes the inevitable stain on philosophy, on thought, demonstrating a thinking that traverses the fantasy of 'pure reason.'

7 Comments

.................agreed, except that it's worse. Zizek reads as if he were a kind of soothing-toned Park Avenue psychiatrist crossed with a lapsed New Age 'Course in Miracles' practitioner combined with the Wizard of Oz before Judy Garland opened the curtains and saw the levers being cranked. Not even taking into account what the far brighter Salman Rushdie or even the tiresome but often brilliant Susan Sontag did with pop culture. Except Sontag also had to 'make it', whereas Rushdie had his own courage, so his came effortlessly. A book like 'the Ground Beneath Her Feet' is light-years beyond Zizek's caressing/rejecting tones; and he hasn't covered any areas that Sontag and Barthes didn't do much more convincingly. Zizek is not unknown, but tries to project an aura of being much more famous than he is. But he should definitely stick with pop culture, even if Sontag's 'Notes on Camp' pretty much covers everything he embodies--which is the failed attempt to be a sex symbol, borne out by his essay on 'Tristan and Isolde': That was clearly meant to scare anyone away from a good lay or even the Sin of Onan.

I think some of the above misses the point: sure, Zizek is very clever about making his work accessible and enjoyable. I have played tapes of his lectures to people who know nothing about philosophy, and they really do Enjoy. The thing is, they get it as well.

Zizek is doing an excellent job of opening up the field of cultural studies for Marxism, while making complex ideas accessible to new readers. Few will beginners imbibe Lacan's ideas more clearly and more avidly than from Zizek himself.

If anything, Zizek's real weakness appears to be a residual sympathy for liberalism, and a tendency to attenuate his commitments depending on where he is (not mentioning his vocal support for the Palestinians in Israel, for instance), as the late Alphonse van Worden once pointed out. That this has something to do with making himself palatable to those audiences, I have no doubt.

And Patrick, I can make no sense of your rendering of Zizek's style, and I certainly can't go along with your value judgments about Sontag and Rushdie, but I would nevertheless like to understand your delphic reference to the Tristan and Isolde essay.

You would? Then maybe you should ask our hostess, who appears to know how to frame my words better than I do. Startling that you think I would answer you directly. Especially since my comment was in response to a comment that our hostess deleted (of course you couldn't know that. On the other hand, I'm not interested in Politburo sentimentalisms). I took a look at your thread on the Zizek Katrina essay (I believe that was it) and saw all sorts of deletions.

Lenin,
Point taken. I accept that my formulation doesn't take into account the way that Zizek's writing opens up new possibilities, brings people into Lacanian theory, etc. So, I agree.

Where I disagree is on the point of a sympathy for liberalism. I don't see this at all. I think his book on Lenin, for example, makes his critical distant from liberal democracy very, very clear. Only in Sublime Object do I see him giving liberal democracy the benefit of the doubt. Everthing thereafter is critical, challenging liberal democracy as a barrier to thinking and asking whether democracy must necessarily be our ultimate horizon.

Trying to argue with the current species of Marxists is about like arguing with fundamentalist Xtians, or those who believe in astrology. First, they think logic (except when it serves their own purposes) is itself "hegemony"; thus showing the absurdities, injustices, and mistakes of marxism, applied and theoretical, is about as fruitful as showing the absurdities of Scripture to a fundie. The marxist and the fundie both take a highly dubious code (and text) to be true in all circumstances; thus they are upholding dogma and not really worthy to debate--tho Marx did claim his system was based on inferences and induction, and thus fallible to some extent--a great extent really.

That said, I think I'll stick around, post twenty ad hominem comments a day, and generally argue brilliantly. Did I mention yet how Marx was based on inferences and induction? Well, off to read some Lyotard.

Kropotkin--yes, I was thinking just today how many of these American communists have just diluted their Christianity so that the embarassment of being previously associated with ignorant religion is lightly concealed.

New gods, or rather really 'Gods', because the loss of God is too painful, are then found and worshipped, and they receive not a cent in compensation; I daresay most are starving in the name of rich Derridas, Zizeks, etc. I doubt they're going to read Kurzweil's new book 'The Singularity is Near,' and that's what the Hyperstition guys are doing right now. They knew some stuff about why the CIA is really not as omniscient as I thought it was. I think that the CIA 20 years ago still did have an aura of being much more powerful than it has proved to be, which still convinced me even when I began to be aware of competition between the FBI and Langley, and the CIA's freedom to pursue its goals entangled with the White House. Anyway, the CIA used to have a coolness to it that's gone. I got somebody to drive me out there in 1987 and it felt scary then, but how could it now? Anyway, has to have something to do with technological advances, and there will probably be increased surveillance with improved robotics, which will, however, often be kept up with by terrorists getting the technology themselves in order to keep up the antagonism (which is why they can stay hidden, and I wouldn't have thought they could have; I didn't know primitive earthly sorts of cave-hiding were still as possible and even relatively easy as bin Laden has proved them to be.)